Make the most of working with a LinkedIn advertising agency

Social media offers a wealth of marketing opportunities and LinkedIn is a platform that ~~shouldn’t be overlooked~~.

LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is the ultimate social media destination if your target audience is professionals, enabling you to reach out to the most appropriate demographics based on their job titles, industries and seniority levels.

Successful LinkedIn marketing must go beyond setting up a profile or company page and truly engage the type of LinkedIn user that could benefit your business. To achieve this, it’s worth working with a LinkedIn advertising agency to take advantage of their experience in the social media world.

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Why LinkedIn should be an important part of your marketing strategy

Marketing to B2B audiences is different to focusing on the B2C space and LinkedIn should be a pivotal part of your strategy. With more than 45 million business decision makers active on the social media platform, you can’t afford to overlook its potential.

LinkedIn ads and content marketing can help to generate leads and guide them through your sales funnel. Every part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy must work together for a cohesive approach that presents your business in the best possible light to the professional audience you’re trying to reach.

How do you target a LinkedIn client?

Before targeting a client on LinkedIn, you need to lay the groundwork, creating a positive presence for your business on the social media network. It’s a good idea to do this via a multi-pronged approach, with a good showing from the company as a whole, as well as your individual employees.

Company page

Start with your company page, which an agency can create for you from scratch or develop from an existing LinkedIn profile. It needs to combine a number of attention-grabbing digital marketing techniques, including an appropriate profile picture and bio.

The About us section of your company page is also very important and should be optimised with keywords to make it findable to relevant LinkedIn users. Outline your business goals and ethos, as well as company culture and the products and services you offer.

LinkedIn group

It’s not enough just to have a company page; your LinkedIn marketing strategy must include other elements too and among them is joining a LinkedIn group or two. These spaces are designed to allow professionals to share expertise within their field, making them a great place to connect with your target audience.

Admission to these groups is as a LinkedIn member, which is where leveraging your employees’ social media presence comes in. Group affiliations are listed at the bottom of individuals’ LinkedIn profiles, so it’s good practice for your staff to be members of relevant communities.

What can you do to make your business stand out on LinkedIn?

Once you’ve set up the basics of your LinkedIn presence with a company page and your employees joining groups, your marketing strategy on the social media channel should be to engage your audience. There are various ways to achieve this, such as posting regularly, buying LinkedIn ads and scheduling LinkedIn Live events.

While it’s important to see how your competitors are attracting B2B clients on LinkedIn, you want your marketing efforts to surpass theirs. Standing out on social media means going above and beyond others in your industry while remaining true to your brand values and ethos.

Regular posting

Publishing content regularly to LinkedIn performs a number of important functions for your social media presence. Not only should your posts offer value to those looking at your LinkedIn profile, they’ll also trigger notifications to your followers, helping you to keep your business in their minds.

Encouraging your employees to share company posts will extend your reach into their communities and may lead potential clients back to your LinkedIn page. You want to position yourself as a thought leader within your industry and consistent posting to LinkedIn on relevant topics is a good way to demonstrate this to a B2B audience.

LinkedIn ads

Directing some of your marketing budget into posting paid LinkedIn ads can be a smart move. They are a good way to draw attention to your company page, your business as a whole and direct traffic to your website. Like most elements of social media marketing, there’s more than one way to go about using LinkedIn ads and it’s important to make the right decisions for your business.

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Selecting the right type of ad on LinkedIn starts with deciding where you’d like it to appear. The options are:

In your audience’s LinkedIn newsfeed
In a member’s messaging inbox
At the top right-hand side of the LinkedIn page
In the right-hand column as a personalised dynamic ad

All LinkedIn ads must be designed with a specific purpose in mind to ensure the best chances of reaching this goal. Ask yourself if your business’ main priority is to promote awareness, boost engagement, drive traffic or generate leads. All of these outcomes are desirable but it’s not wise to try and achieve them all with one type of ad, as you’ll likely dilute your message.

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LinkedIn Live

With LinkedIn Live, you can broadcast on-the-spot video content to your LinkedIn profile, page or event. All you need is to be an approved member of the social media platform and you can address your LinkedIn B2B audience through this powerful medium.

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What services does a LinkedIn marketing agency offer?

Engaging the services of a LinkedIn marketing agency is smart for a number of reasons. Not only can you extend the number of people working on your social media marketing, but you’ll gain valuable expertise. A comprehensive LinkedIn strategy will include everything from sponsored content and advertising to marketing automation and reporting, giving you peace of mind that you’re getting it right.

Can a marketing agency produce content for LinkedIn?

One of the primary roles of a LinkedIn marketing agency is to produce content for publishing on the platform. This should be expertly tailored to suit your audience, the type of post you require and the format that has been agreed. Whether you want copy to be included in a sponsored InMail message, an infographic for a LinkedIn ad or a video to appear in the newsfeed, your digital marketing agency will be able to meet all these needs.

A LinkedIn marketing service will have expertise in all areas of sponsored content, allowing you to leave the creative and technical elements to them. That means articles will be well written and to SEO standards, videos will meet the specs required for effective social media marketing and graphic design will represent your brand’s style guidelines. That level of skills is hard to achieve in-house for most companies, making a LinkedIn marketing agency the perfect extension of your team.

Can an agency post on my behalf?

Just as you outsource other tasks within your business, it makes sense to hand the responsibility for LinkedIn marketing solutions to your agency. That will allow you and your employees to get on with the work you’re specialised in while the social media marketing experts focus on theirs. A good agency will be fully briefed and understand your business’ needs in order to do this effectively.

Your LinkedIn agency will be up-to-date with all the latest developments in marketing automation and the best ways to make the most of these tools. What that means in practice is all your LinkedIn advertising, content and reporting will be set up in an efficient way that allows you to keep to a strict posting schedule and understand your sponsored content’s performance in an instant.

How does LinkedIn advertising posting work?

A lot of LinkedIn advertising service and marketing solutions are run through the platform’s Campaign Manager. Your agency will be able to help you create an account and if you already have one, individual agency employees can be added using their LinkedIn profile URLs just like you would with your own team. Once access is granted, they’ll be able to carry out the majority of LinkedIn marketing and advertising tasks from there.

LinkedIn doesn’t allow for an agency-wide login feature and therefore recommends at least two agency employees having access to Campaign Manager at any one time to protect from getting locked out due to agency turnover. The social media platform warns against trying to circumvent its rules with a shared agency profile as this could interfere with campaigns if it’s discovered.

Even when you leave LinkedIn advertising and marketing to the professionals, your own employees have a key role to play. It’s important they’re liking and sharing your sponsored content and other posts to ensure they get as much engagement as possible. Social media relies on community and your staff’s connections are vital to your business’ marketing success.

What to post on LinkedIn

Knowing what to post on LinkedIn to achieve success involves taking a selection of factors into account. Luckily, with your agency by your side you should have no shortage of ideas for engaging LinkedIn posts. It’s best to embrace a collaborative approach to content ideation that takes your knowledge of the business and industry into account, as well as your agency’s advice on what LinkedIn content performs the best.

That way you can make the most of your shared expertise to come up with content ideas that take varied viewpoints into consideration. Always keep your audience in mind when devising engaging LinkedIn posts, as well as your company’s values and goals, to ensure all efforts are pulling in the same direction to present a unified impression of your business.

What types of content perform well on LinkedIn?

Creating a mix of content to post to your LinkedIn company page, in groups or even to LinkedIn Pulse is vital to your success. That way it will remain fresh and engaging, offering users something different each time they visit their newsfeed. It may even inspire them so much they decide to share it on their personal profile.

Thought leadership

LinkedIn itself recommends thought leadership content as a category that does well on the platform. It suggests this form of blog post or article is a powerful way to grow your audience as it steps away from pieces that are too salesy or promotional, offering an insightful read instead. Positioning yourself as an authority on a subject is an effective way to build trust in your brand going forwards.

User-generated content

People trust other people more than they do companies as a general rule, so having advocates for your business is important. Sharing user-generated content in the form of reviews, testimonials and images is an effective way to demonstrate the value of your products or services to customers. However, you should be careful to check all content shared from a third party is in line with your business’ standards and values.

Visual content

Further to this, LinkedIn highlights the benefits of rich media content to satisfy audiences’ cravings for visual posts. These include:

Collages of three to four custom images in a single post.
One or two-minute videos, complete with an attention-grabbing beginning and subtitles. Previously, an experiment allowed marketers to post short videos in a LinkedIn Story to bring the platform in line with other social media sites, but this has been scrapped in favour of longer videos.
LinkedIn Live sessions, as live video gets 24 times more comments on the platform than regular video.
PDFs and PowerPoint presentations can offer more detail on your brand’s USPs.
Shoutouts to team members to highlight the company’s work while humanising your operation.

LinkedIn Pulse

Another way to get noticed on LinkedIn is to publish long-form content on the Pulse section of the platform. This publishing arm of the site offers users 120,000 characters instead of the 3,000 characters available when posting to a LinkedIn company page or personal profile. Pulse content is aggregated for readers based on their interests, enabling you to reach a targeted audience with these full-length articles.

A LinkedIn user doesn’t want a brand to simply post about itself all the time, but join in the conversation. That means interacting with content from others, responding to comments on a LinkedIn post you created and demonstrating involvement. Social media is a useful way to connect with customers, but it needs to be a two-way street, so be prepared to share relevant content published by others and be part of the discussion.

What is the biggest hashtag on LinkedIn?

Getting your LinkedIn post seen goes beyond just writing great content and sharing it on the social media platform. There are a number of techniques you can use to achieve maximum engagement for your post and one of them is adding hashtags. These metadata tags help the algorithm to determine your content’s value and relevance, but they also indicate to LinkedIn users that you’re part of the conversation.

It can be useful to tap into trending hashtags, but when you’re deciding what to post to LinkedIn it’s crucial to keep your business aims and ideal customers in mind. While some top hashtags like #networking or #learning can be applied across most industries, it’s important not to just target these generic tags, as there’s likely to be others that are more relevant to your business.

Keyword research can help you understand what types of content your audience engages with and can inform not just what you create but also how you tag it. Instead of looking to tap into the buzz around the biggest hashtag on LinkedIn, aim to target the hashtags your personas are using, searching for and commenting on.

What is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

Another method of maximising engagement for your LinkedIn posts is to ensure you’re publishing them at the most appropriate time. LinkedIn content will perform better if it’s put up at the right point during the working week, otherwise it won’t reach as many individuals in the B2B audience.

With this in mind, you should be aiming to post between Tuesday and Thursday for your content to achieve its potential. According to Sprout Social, the very best time to publish posts to the platform is Tuesday between 10am and noon. Don’t forget to take the local timezone of your audience into consideration when scheduling content.

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If the most convenient time for you to post to LinkedIn falls outside of these times, then a scheduling tool can be incredibly useful. Not only can you queue items up to be posted at the optimum time, but it also means you can do all your scheduling for a week, fortnight or month in one go, which can be an efficient method of managing your social media tasks.

A LinkedIn advertising agency will also be able to put posts live for you at the right time for the best chances of exposure. Working with an agency team means you have the expertise and resources at your fingertips for success on LinkedIn. The social media platform can be a rich source of B2B leads if you can harness its potential through an optimised LinkedIn company page, personal profiles for employees and quality content.

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